News

  • Courtesy of P.A.I.N.
    October 09, 2019 at 5:35pm

    Nan Goldin Urges Activists to Join Thursday Rally Against Sackler Settlement Offer

    Photographer Nan Goldin and the advocacy group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) are preparing to hold a rally tomorrow in protest of the terms of an agreement that would potentially settle thousands of cases against OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma over its role in the opioid crisis.

    According to the New York Times, shortly after the pharmaceutical giant, which is owned by the Sacklers—one of America’s wealthiest families and major patrons of the arts—filed for bankruptcy in September, its lawyers declared that the Sacklers may withdraw the $3 billion they pledged to pay as

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  • Toccarra A.H. Thomas. Photo: Kyleelise Thomas.
    October 09, 2019 at 12:35pm

    Toccarra A.H. Thomas Appointed Director of Joan Mitchell Center

    The Joan Mitchell Foundation has named Toccarra A.H. Thomas as the new director of its Joan Mitchell Center, where she will oversee a robust artist residency program, develop public programming and community engagement, and manage day-to-day operations at the New Orleans institution. Thomas most previously served as inaugural general manager of Pioneer Works in Brooklyn and as inaugural managing director of SPACE, a nonprofit art organization in Portland, Maine.Veronique Le Melle has served as interim director since January.  

    “In concert with my own artistic practice, I have dedicated my career

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  • The Swiss Institute. Photo: Nicholas Venezia. Courtesy of Selldorf Architects.
    October 09, 2019 at 11:36am

    Cultural Figures Call for Swiss Institute to Address Assault Allegations Against Tobias Madison

    A group of artists and writers are urging the Swiss Institute in New York to respond to recent criminal charges that have been filed against Tobias Madison, a Swiss artist whose work is currently on view in the exhibition “life and limbs.” According to the Art Newspaper, Madison was arrested on March 7 after he allegedly hit and strangled his ex-girlfriend in December 2018. The artist has since been charged with two counts of assault and one count of criminal obstruction of breathing or blood circulation and is expected to appear in New York Criminal Court for a hearing on October 16.

    A “Letter

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  • Catherine Evans. Courtesy of the Newark Museum.
    October 09, 2019 at 10:08am

    Carnegie Museum of Art’s Chief Curator Joins Newark Museum

    Catherine Evans, the former chief curator and co-director of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, has taken a new job at the Newark Museum in New Jersey. As the new deputy director of curatorial affairs, she will work with museum director and CEO Linda Harrison on reimagining how to present the museum’s collections with the goal of raising the institution’s profile.  

    “Catherine’s thought leadership and sheer energy around the challenging issues of reinterpreting the stories from stellar museum collections is contagious,” Harrison said in a statement. “We are thrilled to have her join the

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  • Judith F. Dolkart. Photo: Susan Beard.
    October 08, 2019 at 5:23pm

    Detroit Institute of Arts Names Judith F. Dolkart Deputy Director

    The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) has appointed Judith F. Dolkart deputy director. Dolkart currently serves as director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. In her new role, she will be responsible for overseeing the institute’s curatorial and learning and audience engagement divisions. Dolkart will take up the post on January 6, 2020.

    “As the director of an art museum located on an educational campus, Judith brings an ideal skillset to this new position,” said DIA’s director Salvador Salort-Pons. “Being able to view and align our work through

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  • Doug Aitken, Mirage, 2017, mirrors, dimensions variable. Installation view, Desert X. Photo: Alexis Hyde.
    October 08, 2019 at 1:38pm

    Three Board Members Resign from Desert X over Collaboration with Saudi Arabia

    Southern California’s contemporary art biennial Desert X announced on Monday that it is hosting an exhibition in northwestern Saudi Arabia in early 2020. The project, which will be funded by the government’s Royal Commission for AlUla, has prompted three of the fourteen original members of Desert X’s board of directors—including artist Ed Ruscha, art historian and curator Yael Lipschutz, and philanthropist Tristan Milanovich—to resign in protest. Accused of various human-rights abuses, Saudi Arabia also faced international outrage after Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was

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  • The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania. Courtesy of the ICA.
    October 08, 2019 at 1:28pm

    Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art Gifted $1.15 Million

    The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania has received a gift of $1.15 million from an anonymous donor. The funds will be used to endow the position of director of public engagement, which is currently held by James E. Britt Jr., and will support a travel fund for undergraduate students studying in the university’s department of the history of art. “ICA is extremely grateful to this anonymous donor for making such a visionary gift,” said interim director John McInerney.

    Since Britt joined the ICA in 2018, he has developed several new initiatives, including Pennsight,

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  • Incoming artists (clockwise from top left) include David Dominique, Jeanine Tesori, Nell Painter, Hernan Diaz, Sarah DeLappe, Jeff Sharlet, Jodi Spotted Bear, and Jibz Cameron. Courtesy of the MacDowell Colony.
    October 08, 2019 at 12:48pm

    Seventy-Nine Artists Awarded MacDowell Fellowships

    The MacDowell Colony has announced that seventy-nine artists from nineteen states and six countries, including Nigeria, Mexico, and Hong Kong, will be awarded fellowships for its upcoming fall residency program. Recipients include artists Jibz Cameron, Clarity Haynes, Anna Hepler, Cyriaco Lopes, and Chris Wright; industrial-pop composer Olin Caprison; historian Nell Painter; architects Charlotte Algie and Mark Shepard; and filmmakers Julia Halperin and Isabel Sandoval.

    “MacDowell is honored to provide time and space at our bucolic property for these remarkable individuals to investigate, imagine,

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  • Victor Arnautoff, The Life of George Washington, 1936, at George Washington High School in San Francisco.
    October 08, 2019 at 12:05pm

    School Alumni Association Sues San Francisco Education Board to Protect Murals of George Washington

    The alumni association of San Francisco’s George Washington High School has filed a suit against the city’s Board of Education, calling for it to conduct an environmental review and rescind its vote to cover up a series of Great Depression–era murals at the school.

    The move comes amid a contentious debate sparked by the murals by Victor Arnautoff, a Russian-born artist, communist, and Stanford University instructor who completed the work depicting George Washington as a slave owner—which includes images of a deceased Native American and the president’s slaves working on his Mount Vernon

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  • Musée Rodin in Paris.
    October 08, 2019 at 10:44am

    Musée Rodin Expands to Shenzhen, China

    Paris’s Musée Rodin announced at a Franco Chinese cultural forum in Nice, France, on Monday that it is planning to open an outpost in Shenzhen, in the Guangdong province of mainland China. The new art center will be built in the next two to three years and will be supported by China’s State Administration of Cultural Heritage, the French Ministry of Culture, and private funding.

    The Musée Rodin will lend more than fifty of Auguste Rodin’s works to the Chinese branch. It has also agreed to sell the center around fifty of the artist’s bronzes. More details regarding the project’s cost and schedule

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  • Walter Hood. Photo: The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize.
    October 07, 2019 at 6:08pm

    Walter Hood Wins $250,000 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize

    Artist Walter Hood, the head of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, California, has been selected as the winner of this year’s Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in recognition of his ongoing achievements in merging landscape, urbanism, and public art. Established in 1994 through the will of stage and screen actress Lillian Gish, the annual $250,000 award is one of the largest monetary prizes given to artists in the United States. The announcement comes two weeks after the artist won a MacArthur “Genius” Grant.

    After learning that he was the recipient, Hood said: “When I look at the artists who have

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  • Matthew Wong, 2015. Photo: Monita Cheng. Courtesy of the artist and Karma, New York.
    October 07, 2019 at 5:13pm

    Matthew Wong (1984–2019)

    The Canada-born and -based, and Hong Kong–raised artist Matthew Wong, a self-taught painter whose psychological and vividly textured dabs of paint and canvas were often populated by a single, isolated figure and recalled the work of Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, as well as Pointillism and Chinese ink painting and lacquerware, has died. The cause was suicide; the artist was thirty-five years old.

    After studying cultural anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Wong moved back to Hong Kong, where he completed an MFA in photography and creative media at City University in 2010.

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